After a great afternoon/evening with Mike, Michael, Kenny, and John (during which we had sushi, went minigolfing, and watched a really fucked up movie), I have spent the past 2.5 hours trying to help my erstwhile frosh, Steven, install Gaim-LaTeX on his new Ubuntu system. The worst part? It still doesn’t work after all this effort. We have been hacking the files together, which involved manually copying files into /usr/include and /usr/lib/pkgconfig, as well as editing config.h, just to get the damn thing to compile. Now, it’s compiled and gaim recognizes it as a valid plugin, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. How frustrating! Unfortunately, apt-get doesn’t seem to have a package for Gaim-LaTeX, which is why we’re trying to do this by hand. Any idea what might be wrong? Does anyone know how to get Gaim to print out debugging information about this sort of thing?
Stephen could always install Windows and then download AIM or Trillian. Both work prettymuch the first time with only a few minutes of install time. Windows can be a bit more temperamental. But he’s a smart guy and can work around those problems.
Isn’t his name spelled Steven?
You’re right! I have corrected my post. Thanks
Gaim itself worked fine the first time; that’s not the issue. He’s trying to get a plugin that lets you write LaTeX in your IMs and have it show up correctly, and this plugin doesn’t even exist for Windows (though I doubt it would be too hard to port, if you’re willing to spend a few weeks on it). Nice try, though!
Works for me:
I might have left one or two things out; that was a lot harder than it should have been.
I’ve always been curious. Do you know why Gaim-LaTeX and Gaim-encryption don’t work with each other? I’ve passed your comment on to Steven; we’ll see if it works.
I just read that in the gaim-latex README, is all. A wild guess: encrypted text might contain the ‘$’ character, and there isn’t a good way to say “make sure encryption runs before latex runs”.
Besides, gaim-otr is better, anyway, so it’s a moot point.
Thanks for telling me about gaim-otr; I hadn’t heard of that before!
Steven tried this on his own and it didn’t work, but when I walked him through it, it did. Thanks for pointing out that gaim-dev and gaim are two different packages that install different files! I would never have thought to check that.